In today’s fast-paced world, financial well-being is more important than ever. However, achieving financial stability and freedom is not just about numbers and budgets. Whether you’re struggling with debt, trying to save for retirement, or simply looking to manage your money more effectively, a holistic approach to financial well-being can help you achieve your goals and live a more fulfilling life.

What is a Holistic Approach to Financial Well-Being?

A holistic approach to financial well-being is an approach that takes into account all aspects of a person’s financial life. This includes not only the traditional aspects of financial planning, such as budgeting, saving, and investing, but also the less tangible aspects, such as mindset, behavior, and lifestyle.

A holistic approach to financial well-being recognizes that financial health is not just about the numbers. It’s about developing a healthy relationship with money, making smart decisions about spending and saving, and aligning your financial goals with your values and priorities.

Benefits of a Holistic Approach:

Taking a holistic approach to financial well-being offers numerous benefits. By addressing all aspects of your financial life, you can achieve greater security, freedom, and happiness. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key benefits of a holistic approach:

1. Greater Financial Security: A holistic approach to financial well-being can help you create a more secure financial future for yourself and your family. By establishing a budget, saving for emergencies and future expenses, and investing wisely, you can reduce your financial stress and build a foundation for long-term financial stability.

Let’s say you establish an emergency fund of three to six months’ worth of living expenses. If you experience a job loss or unexpected expense, you’ll have a safety net to fall back on, which can help you avoid accumulating debt or falling behind on bills. Similarly, by investing in retirement accounts or other long-term investment vehicles, you can help ensure a secure financial future for yourself and your loved ones.

2. Improved Quality of Life: A holistic approach to financial well-being can improve your overall quality of life by reducing financial stress, increasing financial freedom, and freeing up resources to pursue your passions and goals. When you have a clear understanding of your finances and a plan in place to manage them effectively, you can enjoy greater peace of mind and focus on the things that matter most to you.

For example, if you’ve established a budget that allows you to save for a down payment on a house, you can feel confident in your ability to achieve that goal. This can help you feel more grounded and motivated in your everyday life, leading to greater happiness and fulfillment.

3. Enhanced Sense of Purpose: A holistic approach to financial well-being can help you clarify your values and priorities, and align your financial goals with your broader life goals. By understanding what matters most to you and what you want to achieve in life, you can make financial decisions that support those goals and bring a greater sense of purpose to your life.

Let’s say you’re passionate about travel, you might prioritize saving for a travel fund and cutting back on other expenses to make that a reality. This can help you feel more connected to your values and passions and give you a sense of purpose and meaning in your financial decisions.

4. More Sustainable Financial Habits: A holistic approach to financial well-being can help you develop sustainable financial habits that will support your financial well-being for years to come. By addressing the underlying causes of your financial behaviors, such as impulse spending or overspending, you can create lasting changes that will help you maintain your financial health over the long term.

Maybe you tend to overspend on clothes or gadgets; you might examine the underlying emotional or psychological factors that drive that behavior, such as a need for instant gratification or a desire for social validation. By addressing these factors and developing healthier coping mechanisms, such as mindfulness or self-reflection, you can create lasting changes in your financial habits that will support your financial well-being for years to come.

The Key Components of a Holistic Approach

So, what are the key components of a holistic approach to financial well-being? Here are some of the most important:

1. Mindset and Behavior – Developing a healthy mindset and positive financial behaviors is a crucial aspect of financial well-being. This includes understanding your relationship with money, practicing self-control, and avoiding impulsive financial decisions.
2. Budgeting and Financial Planning – Developing a budget that works for your lifestyle, tracking your expenses, and creating a long-term financial plan are crucial components of financial wellness.
3. Saving and Investing – Building an emergency fund, saving for future expenses (such as a down payment on a house or retirement), and investing your money wisely can help you achieve your financial goals and provide financial security.
4. Debt Management – Managing debt is an essential part of achieving financial well-being. This includes understanding the types of debt you have, prioritizing debt repayment, and avoiding taking on too much debt.
5. Insurance – Protecting yourself and your assets with appropriate insurance coverage is crucial to avoiding financial disasters. This includes health insurance, disability insurance, life insurance, and property and casualty insurance.
6. Estate Planning – Preparing for the future and ensuring that your loved ones are taken care of after you pass away is an essential component of financial wellness. This includes creating a will, establishing trusts, and making plans for any business interests.

Putting It All Together

By taking a holistic approach to financial well-being, you can create a more secure financial future for yourself and your family, enjoy greater peace of mind and freedom, and align your financial goals with your broader life goals. To get started, take some time to reflect on your financial goals, values, and priorities, and then develop a comprehensive plan that takes into account all aspects of your financial life. With time, effort, and commitment, you can achieve greater financial security, stability, and happiness.

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As parents, we want the best for our children. We want them to grow up to be happy, healthy, and successful individuals. One important aspect of their success is their financial well-being. That’s why teaching kids about money and financial responsibility is crucial. This education is especially important for children, who are often exposed to financial issues at a young age. By teaching children about money and responsibility, parents can help them develop healthy financial habits that will benefit them in the long run. This article aims to explore the importance of financial education for kids and how parents can teach their children about money and responsibility.

The Importance of Financial Education for Kids:

Financial literacy is crucial for everyone, regardless of age. It involves understanding how money works, how to manage it, and how to make informed financial decisions. For children, financial literacy is particularly important because it provides them with the tools to make informed financial decisions, avoid debt, and achieve financial independence. With the right guidance and resources, children can develop healthy financial habits and understand the value of money.

In today’s world, financial literacy is more important than ever. With the rise of technology and the internet, children are exposed to money-related issues at a young age. They are bombarded with advertisements for toys, games, and other products, and they often do not understand the value of money. By teaching children about money management, parents can help them develop the skills they need to make informed financial decisions and plan for their future.

Moreover, financial education can help kids develop critical thinking skills. When children learn how to analyze financial information and make informed decisions, they develop critical thinking skills that will benefit them in all areas of life. They also learn about risk management, which is crucial in today’s complex financial landscape.

As parents, it is our responsibility to provide our children with the tools they need to manage their finances effectively. By teaching our kids about money, we are setting them up for a lifetime of financial success. So, let’s start teaching our kids about money today!

Ways to Teach Kids about Money and Responsibility:

There are several effective ways to teach children about money and responsibility. The following are some strategies that parents can use to educate their children about financial literacy.

1. Start Early: It is never too early to start teaching kids about money. Even toddlers can learn basic concepts like counting, saving, and spending. You can teach them by giving them coins to count or by playing simple games that involve money. As they grow older, you can introduce more complex concepts like budgeting and saving.
2. Use Real-Life Examples: Kids learn best through real-life experiences. Take them to the grocery store and show them how to compare prices or make a shopping list. Use your bills as a teaching tool and explain how much you pay for utilities, rent, and other expenses. This will help them understand the value of money and how it is used in everyday life.
3. Give Them an Allowance: Giving kids an allowance is a great way to teach them about budgeting and saving. It is important to set clear rules and expectations for how the money should be used. You can encourage them to save a portion of their allowance, use some for spending, and donate some to charity. This will help them understand the importance of financial planning and budgeting.
4. Open a Savings Account: Encourage your child to open a savings account and make regular deposits. This will teach them about the importance of saving money and earning interest. You can set savings goals with them, such as saving for a specific toy or trip. This will help them develop a habit of saving and understand the concept of delayed gratification.
5. Play Financial Games: There are many board games and online games that teach kids about money and finance. Games like Monopoly, Pay Day, and The Game of Life can help them understand concepts like budgeting, investing, and risk management. These games can make learning about finance fun and engaging.
6. Talk About Money: Talking about money with your kids can help them understand how it works and how to manage it. You can explain how your family budget works and how you make financial decisions. You can also talk about your own financial mistakes and what you learned from them. This will help your kids understand that managing money is a continuous learning process.
7. Lead by Example: Kids learn by watching their parents, so it is important to lead by example. If you have good financial habits, your kids are more likely to adopt them. Show them how you budget, save, and invest. Explain the financial decisions you make and why you make them. This will help your kids develop good financial habits and attitudes.

In conclusion, financial education is crucial for children to develop healthy financial habits, avoid debt, and achieve financial independence. Parents can take several steps to teach their children about money and responsibility, such as starting early, providing an allowance, opening a savings account, teaching budgeting, and leading by example. By teaching children about money management, parents can provide them with the skills they need to make informed financial decisions and plan for their future. Remember that financial education is not a one-time event but a continuous process that requires ongoing learning and practice. By making financial education a part of everyday life, parents can help their children develop lifelong habits that will serve them well in the future.

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Whatever one may think of the Bible, it is perfectly natural to have a question and see what it says about that question. The question usually has to do with ethics: What does the Bible say about divorce? What does the Bible say about sex? What does the Bible say about violence? Or in our case today, what does God think of money?

While it is something that we all do, there is a fatal flaw when we go looking for answers to our questions in the Bible. One of two things happens (or both): our biases determine the answer we find, or we distort Scripture to say something we want it to say. An essential discipline behind Biblical academia (or personal spiritual growth) is to take the Bible on its own terms. Organizations like The Bible Project do an amazing job of showing us how to do that.

So, rather than looking for random verses that talk about money, let’s look at how money fits into the grander story God is telling. That way, I might glean wisdom from other stories that do not explicitly talk about money.

What I find through the story of Scripture are three fundamental principles when it comes to money: idolatry (mammon), stewardship, and generosity.

Idolatry (Mammon)

That word idolatry can feel foreign to those of us who don’t talk or read about spiritual things often, but there is no need to be turned off by the word. It simply is an ancient way of saying: my decisions are based on _____________. And you fill in the blank. Idolatry is the idea that your decisions are based on anything that is not God and his instructions.

If you recall back to your middle school history classes, the Old Testament was written, edited, and compiled from the early Egyptian, and into Mesopotamian times (remember the Fertile Crescent?). During that swath of time, an idol was typically a statue that represented the presence of a god. These idols were ceremonially put into temples and it was believed that their presence filled the temple via the idol. Then other idols were placed strategically around the nation so as to represent the deity’s presence in that nation. (Amazing to think how Genesis speaks of God filling his ‘temple’ (earth) with his ‘idol’ (humans) and we represent his presence). In modern times, we obviously do not have idols like that. But we do ‘worship’ different ‘idols’ and figuratively represent their presence in different ways.

 The human heart is prone to worship. We base our decisions around the things that we ‘worship’ to bring that object of our worship more and more glory and power. If success is my idol, I will base all of my decisions on “Will this add to my success?” And ‘success’ can mean, “make my parents proud,” or it can mean “be the CEO by age 35.” If we are being brutally honest, most of us worship ourselves. We are a self-centered lot most of the time. Myself included.

What does any of this have to do with what God thinks of money? Well, he doesn’t want money to become an idol that takes us, our hearts, and our decision-making away from him and his heart for us. And we can make money into an idol without being rich. In fact, those who worship money are probably (anecdotal, not factual) disproportionately poor (or less financially stable). Because we tend to worship things that we think can bring us peace and freedom. We think we will be free if people like us, so we try to buy things to impress people. We think we will be free from pain if we can just drink a little more, so we buy alcohol to relieve the pain. If only we were rich, then we would have peace of mind. The truth of the human heart is that whatever we worship and base our decisions around controls us. The promise of Scripture is that no other idol will give us freedom, other than learning to be our truest selves in the presence of the living God.

Mammon is another weird, old, and irrelevant word. It comes from an ancient Hebrew word that means “Trustworthy.” However, it is commonly translated as “Money” in our modern translations. Mammon, in Scripture, is personified as a spiritual power in competition with God for your trust. Meaning, Mammon is the name of the idol when money becomes that which you base your decisions around because it has gained your trust to bring about peace, security, or freedom.

Stewardship

Stewardship is a concept we are more familiar with. It is the idea to do well with what you have been given. From the first pages of Scripture, we read of a God who gives everything over to us (humans) to take care of and use to create. Stewardship necessitates wisdom. To do well with what you have been given depends on purposes, goals, identity, and many other factors that offer direction.

Good stewardship requires that you learn how to take care of yourself. Sliding into credit card debt (as I did) is bad stewardship.

Good stewardship requires that you know the needs of others. To be a good steward of your finances is to love others well with your finances. You must take care of yourself (and your family) by becoming financially free first (the blind cannot help the blind), but you must not focus your financial decision-making around yourself. An athlete who is part of a team will steward their talents so as to leverage them for the sake of the team, which, as they do so, increases their stats. But when faced between padding the stats and getting the win, the elite athletes will do what’s best for the team. We can say they are stewarding their talents based on wisdom for winning the game. In finances, you don’t have a game to win to guide your direction, but you can still leverage your finances to lift others up based on prudent wisdom.

Generosity

The principle of generosity is a theme throughout the pages of Scripture. Generosity is not limited to giving from out of your abundance but giving until it hurts. Giving until it hurts is not equal to giving until you are ruined. When Jesus calls people to sell all of their possessions to give to the poor, it is attached to idolatry. Those he calls to do that have given their hearts, worship, and decision-making to money. It is not a universal calling to all believers. However, our relationship with money should be ready to give it all away if God calls us to that radical surrender.

Generosity cultivates our hearts and builds our character. It keeps us compassionate and willfully aware of others’ hurts. Generosity is not limited to our financial resources but to our time, talents, kindness, etc. Generosity is not limited to the rich or even the financially stable. By giving money to others’, even out of your scarcity, it begins to soften your heart and you become more intentional in living within your means.

Generosity is an act of worship in Scripture. Some call this tithing and say you ought to be giving away at least 10% of your income. But the way Jesus talks about money we understand that giving until it hurts keeps our hearts from worshipping anything else and becoming too dependent on money for our sense of stability. We can afford freedom and afford to be generous. It’s a mindset, not a budget line. 

Other Thoughts

I will end with a story of Jesus encountering money to give us a full picture of how God thinks of money.

One day, people who did not like Jesus and who were leaders in the community were going to try and trap him in his words. They wanted to make him look bad. So, they asked him publicly, “Should we pay taxes to Rome?” If he says yes, he is a Roman sympathizer, which is equivalent to a cultural backstabber. It would make people feel like when LeBron James first left the Cavaliers. But, if he said no, then the leaders would just turn him over to Rome for misleading the people.

Before answering them directly, he asks them a question. He asked them for a coin to show him. Once presented, he asked them, “Whose image is on this coin?” “Caesar,” they replied. Jesus responds, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but give to God what is God’s.” Caesar can have his money, but God wants you. And what does God require of us? To act justly. Love mercy. To walk humbly with the Lord your God. Jesus really drives this point home in his parable with the shrewd manager. Where the ultimate value is relationships with others, and money can be used in service to that greater cause.

Money is just another resource at your disposal to live out your identity. It’s a way to either feed your character or jeopardize it. Money can make you feel trapped, or it can make you feel free. But it isn’t the money itself that does either of those things, but rather how you interact with it. God does not require you to give all your money away. He does not restrict you from becoming wealthy. In fact, he has little concern with the amount in your account. He wants your heart. He would rather you keep it in its proper perspective and use it wisely and generously. Affording freedom is not a budget line. It’s an identity.

Listen to our podcast about this topic here!

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Why are we constantly pursuing money? Do we want money for money’s sake? Does money guarantee happiness, and is the pursuit of money a goal worth pursuing? We put a lot of pressure on our ability to make money. Sure we need to make money to live and provide for our families; I’m not saying that’s not important. But somehow, along the way, we lose sight of ourselves. Money becomes more important than our values or, maybe more accurately, becomes our only value. Money at its core is only a tool, and a tool is only as effective as the person who’s holding it. Our behaviors dictate our actions, our thoughts dictate our identity, and our identity influences our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us.

Simply put, we can make all the money in the world, but if we don’t work on ourselves and have the proper perspective, it won’t mean anything. When you work on yourself, everything else comes into place. Investing in yourself is the best investment you’ll ever make. Having all the money in the world won’t provide happiness or freedom unless we can see money for what it is, a tool at our disposal. It is not the solution; we are the solution. It is time for you to change your perspective.

Key principles for changing your perspective

1) Let go of the illusion of control

We all constantly thirst for control, which can be highly useful in life; taking responsibility for our actions and being accountable is a great thing, but not accepting the reality of how much we can control leads to disaster. What we believe we can control directly impacts our identity. If we can control outcomes and the outcomes are “bad,” we have failed. In order to change our perspective, we need to understand what we can really control, which spoiler alert isn’t very much.

When we sit back and think about it, what do we actually control in our lives? Can we control how others perceive us or our actions? What about the weather, the stock market, whether we get the promotion, and our relationships? The reality is most of life’s outcomes are out of our control. So the question is, what do we control?

We only have direct control of how we choose to respond to a given situation and our conscious thoughts towards people or situations. Financial and personal peace begins with releasing what you don’t have control over and mastering what you do.

Let’s get practical. Let’s say you are going for a promotion at work. Are you in control of getting the promotion? Sure, you have influence over the promotion by how hard you work and your job performance, but ultimately you do not decide whether or not you get the promotion. So focusing on the promotion is wasting time on what you should be focusing on, bettering yourself. Anytime something we want is outside of our control, our answer should be to look inward, and finances are no exception. To get what we want, we must focus on what we can control.

2) Replacing Trying with Training

I think I use and hear the word try in some form at least 100 times a day. “I tried my best.” “I’ll try and do better.” “I am trying to stick to this diet, but it’s just so hard.”

According to the Merriam-webster dictionary, try is defined as “to make an effort to do something: to attempt to accomplish or complete something.” We need to completely get rid of the mindset of trying. Trying implies an action that is not in line with your identity. When we say try, we leave it up to willpower which will inevitably run out. Trying also is glued to a specific pass or fail outcome. (add more)

We don’t want to try on anything of importance.

Instead, we want to train. Training is defined as “to teach so as to make fit, qualified, or proficient: to make prepared.” Training is connected to your identity. If you try to run a marathon, the odds are you will fail. If you train for a marathon, you will succeed. Our mindset is critical, and we need to be people who train.

The same is true in finances. If you try to get out of debt and become financially free, the road will be difficult. If you train yourself to be a financially free person, you will inevitably become financially free. To learn more about what makes people financially truly free, check out this article on the seven characteristics that all financially independent people share.

3) Embrace and Accept rather than avoid Avoid and Deny

Self-awareness is critical to changing our perspective. If we don’t understand our typical patterns when handling difficult or stressful situations, we don’t give ourselves a chance to overcome them in the future. We like to think of ourselves as self-aware people, but our actions and thoughts often don’t support this narrative.

It is natural to avoid and deny problems, but unfortunately, problems thrive in the dark. When we face a difficult or stressful situation, we will typically avoid or deny it, and sometimes if we are really on top of our A-game, we do both. It feels more comfortable not facing the unknown head-on and challenging ourselves to endure. This is especially true in our financial lives. We are on the edge of bankruptcy, but we refuse to make any changes. We don’t want to take a look at our spending habits because it is too scary to face the mountain of debt.

The first step in dealing with any problem is accepting that the problem is there in the first place. The second thing we must do to change our perspective is to realize that the obstacle in front of us is the way forward. I love how Marcus Aurelius puts it, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Every obstacle provides us a unique opportunity to grow and improve ourselves and the world around us, or it can be another stumbling block that we can’t overcome. The major shift occurs when you realize that you get to choose which way you want to look at it, and that choice will dramatically affect every area of your life.

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Naturally, the idea of learning and improving is fascinating to me, but from personal experience, mastering the skill of learning is not as easy it would seem. I always found school easy, but learning from my mistakes, especially personal interactions and non-book-related mistakes, was a whole new ball game. If it was a formula, I had it down; if it required nuance and interpretation, I have always felt like I struggled in that way. I have never related to any character in the bible more than Paul when he says, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do.” As an enneagram type 5, this absolutely drives me nuts. I have this driving urge to be competent in whatever I’m doing, and so often, I am not.

In our financial lives, being able to learn is critical. Learning financial literacy is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg of our financial learning journey. We need to be able to learn from our mistakes, evaluate what we are doing in the present, and be able to correct course when we steer away.

In this post, we will explore why we should care about learning, the struggles that inhibit our ability to learn, and how to learn from a given situation practically.

Why Should We Care About Learning?

There are numerous benefits to learning, but we will cover two main points when it comes to why we should care about mastering the skill of learning.

1) When we learn anything, we develop our ability to think and think well.

We talked about how 90% of our actions result from our habits in a previous article. Learning requires us to take a more active approach to our thinking which is a great thing. When we learn from our mistakes, we have to decide what’s true, how we should have responded, and critique our own perspective.

A great example of this is being able to discern the difference between us acting insane or just acting disciplined?

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Discipline is insanity without false expectations. So very accurately, our sanity relies on our ability to think well.

2) You are destined to repeat mistakes if you can not learn from them

I know it is easy to say a generically good thing, such as it is essential to learn from our mistakes. Still, when it comes to our financial freedom, we must be able to learn from our mistakes and, ideally, the errors of others to have any chance of lasting success.

One of the most frustrating things in the world to me is making the same mistake over and over again and not being able to identify why. Unfortunately, I often feel stuck in situations where I know I have made similar mistakes, and I can’t seem to learn from them. Often what has stopped me from being able to process my mistakes was not understanding the obstacles in the way of my learning.

What Stops Us From Learning?

Even in the most basic sense of increasing pleasure and decreasing pain, our logic tells us that learning from our mistakes or harmful situations is a good thing. If it is in our best interest to master the skill of learning, why do so many of us repeatedly find ourselves stuck in similar hard situations?

There are a number of elements that stop us from learning from our everyday situations, but today we are going to focus on a couple of crucial ideas.

Recognizing and Separating Weight

I think before we go any further, I need to define what it is I mean by weight. Weight is any type of biased belief that makes a situation have extra meaning. Weights are everywhere in our lives, whether we are consciously aware of them or not. Our ability to cut to the root of the situation is critical to mastering the skill of learning. What stops me so often from seeing a situation clearly is the different weights that get added to a situation that I am either unaware of or unable to define.

There are three primary “weights” that influence our perception of a given situation. Those are the weights we bring into a given situation, the weight that others put on a situation, and the reality of the situation.

Being able to accurately define and separate the weights in our lives is half the battle. This allows us to learn from our situations effectively and stop making the same mistakes.

Stopping to Early

You can’t learn from a situation unless you understand why it happens, or perhaps a better way to phrase it is our leveling of learning is directly tied to our level of understanding. The first step to understanding something is creating the space to be able to think about whatever it is effectively. But if I am being honest with myself, one of the biggest reasons I stop learning is because I think I have found the answer. I stop being curious.

If we think we are right or understand something, we typically don’t think about the situation, person, or thing anymore. For example, if I know my couch is red, I don’t spend time thinking about what color couch that is, did the lighting affect my perception, etc… We may not think of it as a big deal when it comes to the color of our couch, but what about when it comes to more important things? Anytime our knowledge stops our curiosity, we are inhibiting our learning. When I find that position in my life, it is an enormous warning flag whenever I start to think that way consistently.

Mastering the skill of learning is a process that we can sharpen rather than an objective that we can hit. To summarize the best advice on learning from our situations, I will have to quote the great Ted Lasso “Be curious, not judgmental.”

Be curious about ourselves, our situations, and others, and it will make learning from our mistakes that much easier.

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We all would be ok with our finances being multiplied; at least, I know I would. We all want more of something. It could be more savings, more freedom, more time with our kids, whatever it is, we all crave more of some things. This idea of more can consume us quickly if we aren’t continuously aware of what we want more of, but it can also drive us towards the things we love if we root it in our identity. My wife and I have always said that we don’t simply want a good marriage; we want a great marriage. We don’t want to survive, but we want to thrive. This applies to all areas of our lives, but especially our finances. To financially thrive, we need to understand the critical principle of stewardship and the truth that every penny is an opportunity to multiply.

Stewardship — The First Step to Financially Thrive.

To thrive financially and live a life of multiplication, we need to start with unpacking stewardship. In the world we live in, the slow and steady approach is devalued and replaced with the quick and risky. Instead of building a life built on principles, we put all our money on red at the casino and then are upset when our financial situation doesn’t change. What we are unknowing or perhaps sometimes knowingly doing is practicing poor stewardship.

Simply put, financial stewardship is being faithful and multiplying anything you have been entrusted with.

Like everything in this blog, we always focus on our root cause, primarily our identity. We don’t simply want to practice financial stewardship occasionally, but we want to be financial stewards. When we shift from practicing stewardship to becoming a steward, we see a radical change in our outcomes.

Characteristics Of A Financial Steward:

1. Purpose Driven — passionate and discicplined in the mission of being faithful and multiplying the things they have been entrusted with.
2. Compassionate — They understand that money is a tool that has the ability to add value to others not just theirself.
3. Competent — educated in financial topics, have the ability to take in multiple perspectives, and learns from every situation.
4. Courageous — bold and radical in their mission to be financial stewards. Embrace the idea that to get the results that most people don’t get, you have to do the things most people won’t do.
5. Forward Thinking — they understand that a decision today impacts tomorrow. They sacrifice what they want now for what they want most.

Let’s Get Practical

Anytime we receive or give money or wealth of any kind, we are entrusted or entrusting someone with the impact of that money. My wife and I have had to purchase a wide array of baby products, the latest being a sleepsack, or as I affectionately call it, the baby straight jacket. This transaction is not unlike many we make throughout the month but let’s analyze this through a financial steward lens.

Situation: Purchasing A Sleepsack

• The purchase of this sleep sack provides the company to be able to make a quality product and to improve the product offering in the futre. Our money is directly adding value to the companies we spend our money on.
• This provides our daughter a great way to sleep more comfortably and hopefully longer which will improve the life of our daughter and ours as well.
• How much are other brands? is there an alternative that could be more cost effective and better for all parties involved? How long will she be in the sleepsack? Could I find something used or look for a deal?
• Can we afford the sleepsack? Is it a luxury or essential?

I know this can feel like analysis paralysis for some of you, which is something we don’t want, but intentionally thinking about how we do things is very important. We are not looking for perfection; we are simply looking for progress.

I’m sure most of you have heard the phrase anything worth doing is worth doing well. I would argue anything worth doing is worth doing badly. This is not an excuse for lack of effort, but success really is a horrible teacher. Anyone who was once an expert failed when they first started. Most of us have made poor financial choices, and often we are afraid to make a change or put ourselves in a position to make a mistake. If you can’t do it well, do it poorly!

Fail early, fail often, just learn from it! Your ability to thrive financially depends on it!

Principles of Multiplication:

The more we become financial stewards, the more our finances will multiply. It really is that simple. When we are faithful with a little, we will be given more. Faithfulness requires responsibility, consistency, and strength. That is a perfect recipe for building your finances and being able to thrive financially.

I’m sure there are a number of cliches and overused lines on this, but to quote the great Ben Parker, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Unfortunately, everything in our life that is great has the potential to hurt us. A great relationship can be the source of our greatest joy and also our great suffering. It is no different with money and, more specifically, the power of multiplication.

We need to understand two main money ideas to live a life of multiplication.

1) Multiplication happens with there is something to multiply. You can’t multiply with zero.

This is a straightforward principle, but if you don’t have financial margin, you can’t multiply your finances. Now I know that might seem hopeless to many of you out there, but in reality, we are in control of our finances, especially our margin.

Whether we realize it or not, we organize our life about what we most at any given time, and without reflection and accountability, the things we want are instant gratification. We want the house, the new car, eating out, clothes, more than financial peace and margin. It’s because instant gratification feels good, and sacrifice is hard.

The problem with instant gratification is that it creates a destructive habit cycle where the more stressed we are, the more we spend, making us more stressed, and so we spend, and on and on it goes.

This destructive habit cycle constantly erases any work we have accomplished the previous day. The beauty of life is that we have today. We have this moment to change for the better. Shame lives in the past, fear and anxiety live in the future, and peace and freedom are in the present. Which one do you want to multiply in your life?

2) The more there is to multiply, the greater the multiplication. (Either good or bad)

Nothing is stagnant in nature because life is constantly in a cycle of growth and decay. We are no exception. We are either improving daily or decaying daily; there is no such thing as staying the same. We can use this to our advantage when we are intentional or to our detriment when we are unaware.

The adage that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is absolutely true due to the power of multiplication. Let’s make it a little more real; the more debt we are in, the easier it is to get into more debt. It compounds and snowballs feeling unbearable. Contrastly, the more financial margin you can create, the more margin you will be able to experience.

It is discouraging to put all of your efforts into stopping the snowball from getting more prominent. It is exhausting but so worth it.

As always, you got this!

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